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Digital Room Correction vs Room Treatments

I finally got a mic and used REW to analyze my room.  Attached is the freq response for 3 different speakers (Monitor Audio Gold Reference 20, Sonus Faber Electa Amator II, and Sonus Faber Concerto Domus).

They all show similar characteristics - at least the most prominent ones.  I did play around with the Amators trying them closer together and more forward in the room, but the major characteristics you see were mostly unchanged.

With this magnitude and number of deviations from a more ideal frequency response curve, am I better off biting the bullet and just doing digital room correction, or can these issues be addressed with room treatments without going crazy and having the room look like Frankenstein’s lab.

Cost is a consideration, but doing it right/better is the most important factor.

If digital room correction is a viable way to address this, what are the best solutions today?  My system is largely analog (80’s/90’s Mcintosh preamp/amp, tube phono stage), and streaming isn’t a priority (though I’m not against it).

 If the better digital correction solutions come in the form of a streaming HW solution, that’s fine, I’d do that.  

Just looking for guidance on the best way to deal with the room, as both serious room treatments and digital EQ room correction are both areas I haven’t delved into before.


Thanks all.  If more info is needed, let me know.  My room is 11.5’ wide and 15.5’ long with the speakers on the short wall.  Backs of speakers are 3-3.5’ off the front wall and they’re at least 2ft from either side wall.  Some placement flexibility is there, but not a huge amount.

captouch
mahler123
3,533 posts
 

I personally have found that digital room correction does a lot more than room treatments, but I listen to digital sources primarily and the OP is mainly analog.  

ervikingo
176 posts
 

IMHO treat the room before you treat the music. 

you are mostly analog so you have to go a to d dsp then d to a  I can say that on my system my mini dsp HD adds noise  

I have a heavily treated room and have played with dsp below 90hz. It won’t address a dip.  Some tracks sound better others don’t. 
 

good on you with the Aerials. I have 8b which are on the secondary system, main are IRS Beta. 

mitch2
4,245 posts
 

Bass was a constant issue/problem for me when I had larger (mostly full-range) bass reflex speakers. Switching to still large but somewhat lower range limited (down to 40 Hz) acoustic suspension speakers with dual large’ish subs gave me tremendous flexibility to tame bass response issues and resulted in much better sound across the board.

For you folks implementing active correction, once you do the evaluation, how is the active correction implemented physically? Do you need to run the signal through a DSP device? Doesn’t that add noise?  I do not see too much about active correction in these forums but maybe I haven’t been looking.

sns
3,735 posts
 

I'd never use dsp on an all analog system, except for subs which is practically a necessity. My experience is all the dsp software I've tried has negatively altered the presentation such that it sounds less 'natural'. Roon dsp atrocious, HQPlayer much better, still, prefer room treatments in my dedicated room.

captouch OP
34 posts
 

Yes, I'm kind of leaning against considering that the room seems "good enough" now that I've tweaked listening and speaker position.  

To do a MiniDSP w/DIRAC Live experiment would be $500 minimum and to do a more sophisticated custom filter would require inserting a computer into my setup to run the more sophisticated DSP - that's $1000 minimum.  Either of which would add an ADC/DAC step.

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